Mike Benz, the executive director of the Foundation For Freedom Online, discussed the government and military's alleged role in driving censorship on social media platforms by investing in AI technology.

At the National Conservatism Conference on July 9, Benz addressed how the American censorship enterprise got its start and how the government began investing in natural language processing, a new AI-powered technology to censor entire “narratives” online. Specifically, Benz said that censorship mechanisms can be traced to the Obama administration’s efforts to counter terrorist groups in 2014.

“ISIS was said to be recruiting on Twitter, and so the military developed a technology called Natural Language Processing, pouring tens of millions of dollars into this AI technique to be able to determine all the words you say on the internet, everything you post on Twitter, everything you post even on YouTube, that gets transliterated in speech to text,” Benz said.

The Origins Of NATO's Role In Internet Censorship pic.twitter.com/vHot2emQmW

— Mike Benz (@MikeBenzCyber) July 16, 2024

Using this new technique, social media companies can track and ban millions of posts at a time, meaning “entire narratives” can be suppressed, the anti-censorship advocate warned. 

Benz said that the impact of these weapons on the censorship industry was the equivalent of the creation of nuclear weapons in warfare. “This is why I refer to these AI superweapons as ‘weapons of mass deletion.’ …They did for internet censorship what weapons of mass destruction did for war.”

Benz also iterated how a web of NATO-affiliated groups reportedly funded a gargantuan industry to wage what is effectively an unconventional form of warfare upon the citizens of NATO countries. NATO funded these technologies both directly through members’ militaries and also indirectly through organizations like the American National Science Foundation. 

Benz said, “Almost every major player in the censorship industry is funded by the NATO trans-Atlantic military alliance whether directly through the military institutions or indirectly such as military pass-throughs like our National Science Foundation, which has in its charter mandate that 15 percent of its funds have to go towards national security-related technologies and these misinformation or pro-democracy programs, which fund $100 million of censorship institutions here in the US every year are all filtered through that.”

As part of its misinformation and “pro-democracy” efforts, the National Science Foundation issued millions of dollars in grants to university programs that designated ordinary Americans as needing reeducation. In one case, NSF gave a $750,000 grant to the University of Michigan so that UM could develop an AI tool to scan social media posts and determine whether said posts constituted “misinformation.”  

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